Veronica of the eponymous Veronica's Test Kitchen recently made the pork belly confit from Michael Rulhman and Brian Polycn's Charcuterie, and boy does it sounds like something I want in my belly RIGHT NOW: " The confit was crispy on the outside, the meat falling apart but it was the fat that held the concentration of flavors derived from all the spices -- a perfect alchemy of complex tastes that explodes with flavor with each bite."
Georges Rouzeau of Via Michelin magazine, on French food blogs: "95% of these new forums of expression are run, with passion and creativity, by women. A former rally driver, a bookseller, student, housewife, a former computer engineer, a student in Germany, they live in French Guyana, Canada, Portugal, Germany, Grenoble, Paris or Bordeaux. Many of them have travelled extensively. Some of them dream of making a living from cooking. All of them experience great joy in sharing and making exciting new contacts in the four corners of the world. Some have become friends in real life. The blogs with the greatest number of hits receive up to 100 e-mails a day, from requests for clarification about recipes to letters of congratulation. Véronique Chapacou, who ran Saveurs sucrées salées (which has closed down), or Mercotte, for example, are going to write their own cookery books for traditional publication."
Rouzeau links the following eight French blogs at the end of the article, but you'll have to parlez français to really read them: Café créole, C'est moi qui l'ai fait, Clea cuisine, Frais!, La cuisine de Mercotte, Papilles et pupilles, Papilles et pupilles for allergy sufferers, and Tasca da Elvira.
Pim's just posted a great entry on Marthe Delon, the legendary truffle hunter and pig trainer, and her Kiki: "From what I gathered, Mme.Delon got her first pig the year she was married, and over sixty years later she is still hunting truffles and training generation after generation of pigs –one each year, and each one given the same name, Kiki. She said she couldn't be bothered remembering the names of them all, so she just called them Kiki. Easy enough, yes?"
New York Magazine's just released their Best Of listings for 2007 and as always the eating & drinking section is interesting reading. Some shoo-ins, some surprises, making it this a good but not earth-shatteringly great list of places to revist or try for the first time. Our Adam Kuban's already written about their 2001 burger picks over an A Hamburger Today, but I'm more interested in personally verifying their best places for Sunday Brunch.
Flickr's Bento Boxes group has a great thread on budget bento ideas, well worth reading if you regularly pack lunches for yourself or for your kids, whether or not they're bento. This tip is pretty nice, especially in this age of hugely oversized meals: "Bento are small - learn to only buy what you need. I actually have saved money on food because I just don't eat as much."
"Consider the jellyfish salad or sesame jellyfish. It’s a cold dish. Very simple to prepare. You can get all of the ingredients to make it including the jellyfish at any well-supplied Chinese grocery store." Eddie Lin of Deep End Dining gives you a recipe for jellyfish salad, which sounds and looks weird but is delicious in a simultaneously sweet and salty, crunchy and slippery kind of way. Make the recipe but feel free to skip his sneaky final step—introducing it to the unwary by disguising it in a Peanut Butter and Jellyfish sandwich!
"Taste T.O. is a group blog dedicated to covering Toronto’s food and restaurant scene. From burgers to Berkshire pork, greasy spoons to gourmet hot-spots, cheese shops to Chinese take-aways - if you can eat it or drink it, we’ll write about it."
Time Magazine's current cover story is Eating Better Than Organic by John Cloud, in which he explores the debate between buying local and buying organic. Which is better for the food system, food grown by a small farmer locally or one grown by a big organic firm that uses large-scale industrial methods? Is buying local food that might have been treated with pesticides better for the environment than organic food that's been trucked, shipped and flown from far away, using up tons of fossil fuels? Which tastes better? Cloud asked Whole Foods CEO John Mackey for his opinion:
He told me that when he can't get locally grown organics--and even he can't reliably get them--he decides on the basis of taste. "I would probably purchase a local nonorganic tomato before I would purchase an organic one that was shipped from California," he said. He called the two tomatoes "an environmental wash," since the California one had petroleum miles on it while the nonorganic one was grown with pesticides. "But the local tomato from outside Austin will be fresher, will just taste better," he said.
Cloud goes on to check out restaurants dedicated to local ingredients, like New York's Blue Hill which sources 80% of their food from within the New York region, or the free restaurant at Google HQ in Mountain View, CA called Café 150, which only uses food produced within 150 miles of them, as well as joining a Community Supported Agriculture, which lets you subscribe to a local farm and receive fresh produce every week or month.
Do men get better service than women at restaurants? asks Cynthia Kilian of the New York Post. Tim Zagat of the eponymous guidebooks says yes: "Women arriving together very often get shown to less-desirable seats. Men always seem to be offered the bill, regardless of who's paying, even the female boss. And when it comes to tasting wine, "very often they'll give it to almost every man at the table before they get around to [the woman] ordering the wine," Zagat says." Is the poor service because women tend to tip less than men do? Or do women tip less because they don't get treated as well? All I know is, shoddy service means I'll never go back—and I'll tell all my friends to stay away.
ClanVidHorse on Ask Metafilter: "Every time I go camping I end up eating lots of convenience food (instant noodles and the like) that I never would normally consider eating at home but with Spring coming around again I am determined that this year I eat as well as possible whilst enjoying the outdoors. I want recipes that use minimal amounts of fresh ingredients whilst still being tasty and enjoyable to eat." Lots of great tips and easy recipes you can use even if you're at home being lazy!
Fourth the request for doner kebabs! So delicious and so easy to eat quick.
Kitchen work is hard on your body, the hours are terribly long and the money is not great unless you are in the very top tier—you'd have to be nuts or at the very least very naive to start a kitchen career thinking you'll get rich. Having said that, I'm going to point my fingers at two Food Network stars who've never worked in kitchens: Sandra Lee and Rachael Ray. Celebrities, yes; chefs, no. Their shows make me sad for the tastebuds and health of the people that watch them.
was this a waste of time?
Did you get cupcakes, or did you leave the line? If you stayed and you liked them, then it wasn't a waste of time. Who cares what other people think?
Having said that, I'm in the minority that actualls prefers the super sweetness of Magnolia's cupcakes—the sugary icing makes me feel like I'm 8, in pigtails at a friend's birthday party! Nostalgia makes any treat taste even better, really. Sugar Sweet Sunshine's cupcakes are tasty but if I'm going in there (I live five minutes away and go at least once a week), the banana pudding is a full order of magnitude tastier than any cupcake on the planet. And I don't usually like bananas or pudding!
What Husband said! I would cook ten times more if there was a machine to clean up after me.
I know you've had balut in Vietnam, and Filipino food doesn't have the sexy reputation extended to its neighbors in Southeast Asia, but you're still missing out by not visiting the Philippines—c'mon now, my people love pork so much there's an entire neighborhood in Manila dedicated to roasting pigs year-round.
I was addressing this calorie-centric view of nutrition
Read my post again, please; that's actually Krispy Kreme's view, not mine. My comment about the 20 calories savings was not pulled out of thin air—it's clearly in response to their touting the lesser calories as A Big Deal.
And let's be honest, Krispy Kreme is doing this in response to their losing money because of low carb diets, hoping that people who don't know much about nutrition (most people) will think the whole wheat doughnut is going to be a treat they can swap in that's going to help make things better, and that's wrong. The huge emphasis being placed on low carb, low fat, whole wheat, skim milk, etc is messed up in a diet-crazy, eating-disordered country where people will gladly eat all those things but in hugely oversized portions, when the truth is we'd most of us do just fine eating traditional food in moderations.
people may actually prefer the taste of whole wheat
See, now that's crazy talk right there! But seriously, you totally missed my point: doughnuts are perfectly fine the way they are, it's our eating habits that are messed up.
Or they may prefer having 4 marginally less delicious whole wheat doughnuts a month to their normal 3 traditional doughnuts.
If you want an example of illogical thought, that's a classic example right there, from the US "more is better" school. There's no good reason someone with a healthy attitude towards eating would or should prefer to have four less tasty, only slightly healthier doughnuts to three tastier doughnuts in one day, let alone over a month. Imagine asking your average Parisian to choose between eating three proper butter croissants and four whole wheat croissants!
A doughnut shouldn't have to be better, is my point. It should be okay for a doughnut to be a delicious fatty treat, and people should be able to have a delicious fatty treat every once in a while without feeling any guilt. The health hype is wrapped up in food guilt, and that to me is a large component of what makes eating in the US both unhealthy and fearful. Eating should be pleasurable, not stressful.
I like it a lot too! You, me and Adam should go to McDonald's together sometime.
Bayside in Miami? In Queens? A little more specificity goes a long way!
Ed, a quick follow-up on Britt's in Carolina Beach, NC. They have been in the same shop since 1939, and I'm not sure if they've updated much since then. They are only open in the Spring and Summer, and from the beginning they've only made one type of doughnut, glazed. They stopped with one simply because you can't improve upon perfection. You can find some sinfully delicious fried lumps of dough everywhere you go, but Britt's are truly orgasmic. Before you go, put 911 on the speed dial, as it's difficult not to consume the whole bag before you can get back to the car. That nice warm fuzzy feeling you get after eating a bag or two is probably your arteries congealing. Ah, but if you gotta go, you ain't gonna find a tastier way...
I just ran across this site and thought someone could help me. We are originally from Detroit MI and grew up with Awrey Bakery goods. We now live in CA and have a small store, a nut shop, in Temecula CA. We carry some MI products, among them , the Awrey Date Nut bar. It sells really well and we were actually buying it from their outlet store in Livonia MI. Since it's a product that is fairly popular, awrey, in its infinite wisdom, now refuses to ship out. It can only be bought through the big distributors and they won't bother with a small mom and pop store. If anybody knows where I can purchase these bars, please let me know.
ckeaton
I have been eating these cookies for years and have always wondered where did they come from. Today I bought a pack fo the figs and the thought came to my mine to go on the internet and find out. Now the mystery is over. I thought the Koreans made and controlled them. They are the only ones that I know who sell them. Thanks for the research
Rachael, Guy and SLoP should be BANNED. Every Rachael recipe I've tried has come out like s**t.
I love just about everyone else on the FN.
I've been curious about these for a very long time...I just had my first one today, of the whole-wheat variety, and it was pretty tasty. But I totally thought it was stuffed with figs, rather than dates.
i think most of their stuff is yucky. i'm a big fan of the cupcakes from yura and crumbs.
Not. We had to wait in line for quite a while also and I made a big deal out of them because the person we were with from NYC was a huge devotee. I found the cake quite dry and the icing was way over the top , sharp pain the the jaw kind of sweet. I would try any of the other dozen bakeries nearby next time.
Magnolias cupcakes are good. The frosting is a little odd. But good. If you want an amazing cupcake go to Sugar Sweet Sunshine on Rivington
(get a cupcake and a cup of banana pudding)
I though this blog explained the difference of Inverted Cane Sugar vs. HFCS for Jones...
http://www.bevreview.com/2007/06/18/update-jones-soda-cream-soda-pure-cane-soda-version/
It says:::
Your post compared HFCS with pure cane sugar, but I think there was still confusion about the differences. HFCS is produced from pure corn syrup by an enzymatic process which converts some of the glucose molecules that corn plants produce (their form of sugar) into fructose molecules (a different form of sugar).
Most HFCS’s are actually a mixture of pure corn syrup (100% glucose) and HFCS, and the percentages of each vary depending on the desired use of the mixture. Sugar cane plants produce a different kind of sugar than corn does, namely sucrose. The difference is that glucose is a single 6-carbon ring, while sucrose is actually made up of two rings, one 6-carbon ring and one 5-carbon ring.
Your explanation of “inverted cane sugar” is on the money, and so your question about whether inverted cane sugar is better than HFCS is a valid one. The truth is, both fructose (the 5-carbon sugar) and glucose (the 6-carbon sugar) are cyclic hydrocarbons, and as a result, your body breaks them down in similar processes.
However, the sugar molecules that the human body manufactures for energy by its own processes (from things like the carbs we eat) are always glucose. Therefore, in humans, the metabolic path that breaks down glucose is more efficient than the one that breaks down fructose. Also, if I had to venture a guess, the Jones Soda people may have a few environmentally friendly types in their organization who understand that our addiction to all things corn is not healthy for our bodies, our economy, or our environment
Wow.....the animosity towards Sandra Lee in some of the comments is quite interesting. I’ve worked with and have hired professional chefs over the years and the short cuts they use in their cooking isn’t much different from Sandra Lee’s. She’s just honest about it. I know of one 5-star restaurant that opens a can of Campbell’s tomato soup, adds some garnish, gives it a fancy name and charges a ridiculous price. Anyone who utilizes a can of San Marino for a tomato dish cannot possibly sit in judgement of others.
I’ve tried some of the recipes of the highly rated “chefs” mentioned here and found them to be quite disappointing. The end result is what it’s all about....not how much one slaved in the kitchen.
Sandra Lee makes cooking fun....especially for those just starting out. And nowadays, with so many young folks working many hours in serious careers, I’m sure it’s nice to have a quick, fun recipe when one finally gets home at 7:00 pm and the kids are famished. I can’t wait to try some of her recipes with my grandson when he gets old enough.
I liked Alton Brown better before he went gimmicky and goofy.
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